Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

This is a photo of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan speaking in front of a Trump Vance sign, designed as a representation of the kayfabe presidency.

The Kayfabe Presidency

April 20, 2026 / / 0 Comments

We have no shortage of comparisons and metaphors for the Trump presidency! Let’s see how professional wrestling and kayfabe fit into that picture.

Many of these metaphors stem from the Great Fascism Debate, which I joined for some time before swearing it off. Among other problems, the “Trump as Hitler” and “Trump as Mussolini” move is lazy. Even worse, it commits the sin of lack of imagination.

But I’ve flirted with several comparisons myself. Entering the 2016 race as a media mogul using right-wing populism and a kayfabe personality to climb to the top, Trump looked remarkably similar to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

More interestingly, I compared Trump to trash TV character Al Bundy from Married with Children.

How’d that go? Bundy was a roughly middle class guy in suburban Chicago, so he’s not like Trump in terms of job or income. Rather, Bundy personified the Trump voter. He aired white male grievances at a variety of targets – a feminist neighbor, a woman boss, a Latina TV anchor, and so on.

However, these metaphors have all become tired. With that in mind, let’s return to that earlier word ‘kayfabe.’ Maybe it can offer us new clues.

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A Popular Front cartoon that shows three workers stepping on a large snake with a Nazi swastika on it.

A Popular Front Against Trumpism?

April 13, 2026 / / 0 Comments

In The Great Fascism Debate, we see the emergence of a rough analogue to to the Popular Front of the 1930s. In listening to people tell it, it goes something like this: a grand coalition of leftists, progressives, liberals, moderates, and soft conservatives must come together to fight the great authoritarian right threat of the 2020s.

Readers of my previous work won’t be surprised to find that I greet this claim with skepticism.

It’s not that the authoritarian right doesn’t pose a threat in the 2020s. Rather, it’s that I’m already well on record pointing out that the threat in the 2020s doesn’t look much like the one from the 1920s to the 1960s. However, I also think, for quite different reasons, that a ‘Popular Front’ is the wrong frame. That kind of alliance today holds little potential to help the left achieve its goals.

Let’s focus on that.

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An artistic silhouette of a city hall building with city hall written on the front and a flag on top.

Can Local Government Lead Us?

April 6, 2026 / / 0 Comments

In 2025, we uncovered reasons for optimism about the potential for local government to drive leftist political change. Zohran Mamdani’s election in NYC, in particular, brought together a promising electoral coalition: leftists, young people, working class people across racial lines, the economically and politically disaffected, and progressives of all racial groups.

We even saw a local version in Iowa City. Electorally, Oliver Weilein won a city council special election, becoming likely the furthest left candidate ever elected to city office anywhere in the state of Iowa. But it’s not just about Weilein’s election. We also see potential in moves toward social democracy in our policy discussions. From fare free transit to permanent supportive housing, public debate shifted to approaches friendlier to leftist goals.

It did so against the backdrop of far right advance at the state and federal levels.

These are good things. But there’s a tension in that, or so I’ll argue. I want to balance the good with a note of caution. The shifts in local government remain partial, incomplete, and subject to sharp limits. While affirming the optimism many of us rightly feel, I’ll say a word in this post about those limits.

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